An ad for Grand Canyon University made me decide to write about how we, as a society, over-value college. Here’s the ad. Though, better yet: Here’s a slightly-altered transcript that brings the subtext to the fore:
TELEGENIC HISPANIC TEEN: I’m going to get my master’s degree from Grand Canyon University’s online program!
STRAIGHT-FROM-CENTRAL-CASTING HISPANIC GRANDMOTHER: (in Spanish) I am speaking Spanish to remind you that I emigrated here. And I am so proud of you…because of the Master’s degree thing. I was not proud of you before now.
TELEGENIC HISPANIC TEEN: My Abuelita’s dream was to come to this country so her family could get an education and have a better life.
(Shot of Abuelita being kind and grandmotherly, which drives home the point that if this kid doesn’t go to Grand Canyon University and become a Professional Business Guy or something, then he’s basically pissing on his Abuelita’s dreams)
(Shot of family at dinner, but it’s obviously staged because nobody is looking at their phone)
TELEGENIC HISPANIC TEEN: I’m going to get my master’s degree online at Grand Canyon University!
FAMILY: Yeah, we figured, because we all signed releases to be in an ad for Grand Canyon University. But also we are so proud of you!
College is good for many things. It can help you avoid service in Vietnam, broaden your mind about what counts as a “mixed drink”, and provide valuable life experience in case you’re tapped to write the next Van Wilder movie. Unfortunately, Grand Canyon University is selling college as a way to make your family proud. Which is kind of fucked up, but probably very effective! And that has inspired me to express some opinions about what college is, and what it emphatically is not.
Here’s my frame of reference: I started college at Evergreen State, quickly transferred to the University of Oregon, and finished at Georgetown. After a year of being a temp, I went to grad school, got an MA from the University of Chicago, and became an intern (it's called “leveling up”). So, those are my experiences: I’ve attended two “Ivy Plus” schools, a large state university, and one total joke hippie freak show.
I’m glad that I ended up at highly-rated private schools, because I learned something there that I couldn't learn at a state school: I learned that platinum-level dumbasses graduate from elite colleges all the time.
Elite schools are often thought of as something akin to Shaolin monk kung-fu training, but for the mind. Before I went to a top school, I imagined that students at such places engaged in fierce intellectual combat; I pictured classmates attacking each other with Nietzsche and Wittgenstein quotes as if they were nunchuks and throwing stars. Students who passed these harrowing rites of passage would gain the coveted Sheepskin of Enlightenment; those who failed would be thrown into a mountain crevasse to have their flesh picked apart by condors.
That’s not at all what happens. In reality, almost nobody flunks out of an elite college; the graduation rate at Ivy League schools is 96 percent. And if you’re thinking: “That’s because they’re so selective,” well, sure…that’s part of the story. But I’ve known morons who went to Ivies. Also, for comparison: 27 percent of first round picks in the Major League Baseball draft never make it to the big leagues, and those kids are subjected to scouting, physicals, and statistical analysis a billion times more rigorous than the sorta-bullshit evaluative measures that get you into a top school. Being a preternatural genius will earn you an Ivy League degree, but so will being a half-engaged warm body whose tuition checks clear.
True intelligence is not required for a college degree. Nor should it be: Intelligence would frankly be way too much to ask of people in their late teens/early 20s. Their brains are not fully developed, and they contain nothing but video game cheat codes and steps to Tik Tok dances anyway. That’s probably why colleges basically just require students to make a good faith effort to appear to be making a good faith effort. If you’re assigned a 20-page essay, then you need to turn in 20 pages of English-language words — the only real rule is that you can’t just type “zmixclk ijfs sjfksj uidjdnjjh”. If the thinking behind the essay has the intellectual heft of “zmixclk ijfs sjfksj uidjdnjjh”, that’s fine; just please appear to be doing work that’s not total garbage. Which is a skill you'll need in the workforce, anyway.
Going to college changed my perspective on what college is and what a degree means. I now see college as a good place for young people to grow, but I don’t see it as a place that validates anything about anyone whatsoever. But other people see college differently; they chase the validation that college can confer. And Grand Canyon University is hoping that you’ll be so desperate for validation that you'll cut them a large check just to impress your grandma, which is symptomatic of the society-wide overvaluation that I think is a big problem.
Admittance to elite universities has become a blood sport; it’s the only part of the experience that does resemble the Shaolin monk death match I imagined earlier. People believe that a degree from top college will get them elite status, and they’re not completely wrong. If you want to be a big shot — if you want to be in conversations hoping that some how, some way, you’ll be able to organically mention where you went to college — then your hoity-toitiest option is also your best one.
But should that be true? Should an elite degree put you on the fast track to an important job and a spot in the Tesla set? I’d say “no”, because I believe the degree proves very little. At a minimum, we should always remember that these degrees are earned early in life, well before most people will reach peak productivity. To use another baseball comparison: Good college performance is like a good season in rookie ball. Which is to say: Really nifty! But there is still so far to go before we know who you’re going to be. If we’re considering the allocation of elite-level jobs — i.e. the type of job where you have real responsibility and others pay the price if you fuck up — then I think those should be doled out based on real-world performance. What you did in college should be mostly irrelevant.
Non-elite colleges are also often seen as a gateway to higher status. At a minimum, they’re seen as a gateway to air-conditioning; my dad went to college because he was tired of working construction jobs outdoors, and I think a lot of people follow similar logic. Of course, many jobs do require a college degree. If you want a shot at an air-conditioned workspace — not to mention other office-job perks like free Danish and once-a-year trips to conferences in exotic places like St. Louis and Pittsburgh — then you might need to go to college.
But should that be true? I think it should be less true than it is. I think that some jobs require a college degree because people are using “college educated” as a proxy for “smart”. And I think that’s a mistake. That mistake is compounded when combined with what I think is our society’s over-valuation of intelligence. So: First we over-value intelligence, then we wrongly view college as a proxy for intelligence, and the upshot is that Grand Canyon University can guilt people into paying for an online university that sounds like it’s based in a hole.
This overvaluation leads to problems. Surging demand has caused the cost of a four-year degree to skyrocket. Admissions battles put undue stress on young people. People go to college because it just sort of seems like the thing to do, and sometimes they take on debt that they’ll struggle to pay back. We under-value jobs that don’t require a degree, even though some of those jobs pay well, are sorely needed, and are highly professional. People feel superior or inferior based on whether they went to college. This is all bad stuff. And I think it would be lessened if we stopped seeing college as some sort of referendum on a person’s abilities.
What I’m saying is: The villain here is that kid’s (surely fictional) Abuelita. What a bitch. She needs to stop doling out her love for her grandkids based on whether they collect vanity degrees to inflate her social status. If she really loved her grandson, she'd respond to his master’s degree announcement with questions like “Why do you want to do this?”, “Have you considered other options?”, and “Do you have a plan for payment?” For fuck’s sake: She didn’t even ask what he was going to study!!! How do we know he’s not going to go shell out $100K to get an MA in Philosophy of Batman? This kid could be throwing time and money down a Grand Canyon-sized rat-hole and his (definitely fictional) family is applauding him for it!
A response that’s closer to how I think we should react to college comes from Phil Hartman in SNL’s “Dysfunctional Family Feud” sketch. Faced with the prompt “Things you say to a college graduate,” Hartman replies: “I bet you think you’re smarter than me now.” Yes…that is the right attitude. Because college says almost nothing about a person’s intelligence. It’s a tool, an experience, an option that will be right for some…but not an inherent good. Too many people see college as a totem that separates winners from losers. It is not.
And for anyone who wants to get on their Grandma’s good side: This assortment of gift soaps is available on Amazon for 1/2411th the price of a master’s degree. Maybe buy her that and approach the whole graduate school question with clear eyes.
A college education is a weird thing that sometimes feels like it means different things to the student, the employer, and the actual college.
When I was going through college, I even was able to see the increasing tendency towards a feeling of it being like a summer camp for adults. So many funded student groups, student services out the wazoo, money dumped on glow ups for student housing. It's hard to say that no student services should be funded or that no student groups should exist, but with the rise of admin bloat and the rise of stupid courses that are basically fanfiction 101 taught by criminally underpaid adjuncts, it's hard not to see that many residential colleges are focused on students having fun and pushing them through to graduation.
But students think they are getting a job certificate and employers are expecting that people with college degrees have useful skills and I think that the mismatch is just untenable.
We hired a couple of recent college grads and they are wonderful, curious, hard workers. They ask questions, they defer to expertise, they try new things and learn new skills. So I don't think colleges are a completely doomed project. But the amount of debt they are saddled with relative the the relatively small amount of real skills they obtained is heart breaking. They don't get paid enough. It's hard to tell if their maturation was actually enhanced by college. Probably? Maybe? Maybe not? Who knows. But it can hardly be worth the 10s of thousands of dollars and lost income for 4 years.
I went to private school, and from the time I got there to the time I graduated, it was all about “getting into the right college.” For a long time, I believed that not going to college was akin to original sin. Now, almost 35 years later, I envy those kids who aren’t paying on student loans until the Second Coming and wish I’d started making money right out of high school. College is beyond overrated.